But we have technology nowadays that can look through many feet of sediment.

The images we now have of the North Sea bottom are from oil companies searching for oil, and some additional, but minor archeological surveys.

If the public was willing to support an archeoloical survey of the bottom of the North Sea, things would change. Well, I hope they would.

Things will change, yeah, as soon as they report finding a pyramid shape down below, heh.

About those feet of sediment, this is what they found (from one of the sites I linked to earlier) :

In a pilot project beginning in 2002, the researchers reconstructed

6,000 square metres of the ancient landscape slightly larger than a

football field. There, about 10 metres beneath the modern seabed, they

discovered the course of a major ancient river, almost as big as

today's Rhine. They named it the Shotton River, after Birmingham

geologist Fred Shotton who, among other things, was dropped behind

enemy lines to map the geology of the Normandy beaches before the D-

Day landings.

And the maps I have posted in this thread are all based on bathymetric research, and that shows how the present sea floor is shaped. Based on those maps, they created the images I posted here, showing the possible shape of Doggerland when it was still above water.

But those familiar with the North Sea know it has strong currents, high (and sometimes 'freak' waves of up to 20 meters/60 feet) and many storms. It will be no surprize that during 8000 and more years the seabed will have changed shape, and that what we see now is not the same shape as Doggerland had when it was still above sea level.

Even if they are able to 'scrape off' the sediment that has formed during thousands of years, that will not give us the true shape of former Doggerland; we don't know (well, *I* don't) what part of the sea floor has been changed more by the sea currents, and what part less. I mean, after Doggerland got flooded, and before the sediments started forming, the surface of what was once Doggerland may have been severely changed by the Storegga Slide and all the sea currents that came into existence right after the connection with the Channel was re-opened.

Something else: I have read posts on this site, about socalled ancient and strange maps depicting what the posters assumed were maps of many thousands of years ago, and copied by medieval map makers.

But if these maps were as ancient as they assumed they are, then why don't we sea a North Sea with more land than sea?

Personally I think that is the best argument against the supposed age of those maps.

Abramelin 2,545

Abramelin 2,545

A new and somewhat rare marker now makes its appearance, further subdividing the Ingert subclade of the Ivan gene group. The founder of this marker lived somewhere in the northwestern regions of the European continent, perhaps even in what seems a very unlikely place: the bed of what is now the North Sea. How could this be possible? “At the time of the great post-LGM European expansion of 15,000 years ago, there was no North Sea. Instead, there was a flat grassy plain stretching all the way from Poland and the southern Baltic, through southern Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Frisia and Holland across the North Sea and in to eastern England. In fact, had they wished, our forebears could have walked in a straight line all the way from Berlin to Belfast, although they seemed to prefer wandering along beaches.”15

Author David Miles agrees. “At this time of low sea level much of the North Sea basin was dry land, linking Britain and the Continent. Flint tools and animal bones fairly frequently turn up in the nets of trawlers from this drowned world, which the Exeter University archaeologist Bryony Coles has named ‘Doggerland.’…where once herds and hunters moved in annual rituals….

“…Doggerland would have covered an area about the size of England, a tundra landscape across which vast herds of reindeer and horses plodded, where salmon spawned in its prolific rivers. As the climate warmed, oak woodland colonized the valleys and hills. Red deer, roe deer and wild pig replaced the barren-ground reindeer. It remained an ideal hunting ground….

“Around the shores there is still plenty of evidence of these coastal changes: waterlogged stumps of prehistoric trees in the Thames estuary, or Cardigan Bay, where the sea has drowned magnificent ancient forests.”16

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PersonFromPorlock 1,313

PersonFromPorlock 1,313

Do we really have a good idea of how long cultural memories last, especially in a primitive society where people have to entertain themselves? So long as there are campfires and boredom, it doesn't really seem likely a rousing story would disappear, although it'd probably get embroidered upon. No one seemed to have much trouble with the idea that the Biblical Flood legend might be sourced in the Black Sea flood circa 5600 BCE.

As I suggested above, there's a real possibility the Noah legend simply crowded out the 'Doggerland' flood legend. It's a good story, with Divine intercessions, the virtuous being mocked and then... the wicked punished, the virtuous getting the last laugh and a happy ending for all (presently) concerned. After that, who'd want to hear a story about another flood that may well have amounted to no more than "It was a real bad couple of weeks."

(I'm not sure if these comments are really responsive to the original post, but I'm pooped and I'm damned if I'm going to waste the effort I've put into 'em. )

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Abramelin 2,545

Abramelin 2,545

Do we really have a good idea of how long cultural memories last, especially in a primitive society where people have to entertain themselves? So long as there are campfires and boredom, it doesn't really seem likely a rousing story would disappear, although it'd probably get embroidered upon. No one seemed to have much trouble with the idea that the Biblical Flood legend might be sourced in the Black Sea flood circa 5600 BCE.

As I suggested above, there's a real possibility the Noah legend simply crowded out the 'Doggerland' flood legend. It's a good story, with Divine intercessions, the virtuous being mocked and then... the wicked punished, the virtuous getting the last laugh and a happy ending for all (presently) concerned. After that, who'd want to hear a story about another flood that may well have amounted to no more than "It was a real bad couple of weeks."

(I'm not sure if these comments are really responsive to the original post, but I'm pooped and I'm damned if I'm going to waste the effort I've put into 'em. )

If you read Ceasar's "Bello Gallico", you will know that the druids didn't want to write anything down, they were trained to know all the knowledge they possessed by heart.

More or less the same thing with the Aboriginals in Australia.

--

"A real bad couple of weeks", hahahaa!!

Jesus, maybe many thousands drowned in that flood, and they will surely have had family and related tribes living on the present coasts of the North Sea.

No, I really think that some kind of acount about that flood - now hidden away in cryptic language - survived for thousands of years, and maybe even untill now.

Or.... it became inhabited again by the ancestors of the Frisians, hence the name of an island called "Friesland". (today we have here in Holland a province called "Friesland", and that is just a tiny remnant of their kingdom along the south North Sea coast, many ages ago; it stretched form the coast of Belgium up to Jutland/Denmark).

Only, it was so long ago - and even this remnant of Doggerland got submerged - that only vague rumours, myths and legends survived untill the Zeno brothers picked it up again during the middle ages in some harbour.

The Zeno brothers, not having a clue where this mythical island could have been located, just gave it a place somewhere in the North Atlantic.

It's a 'what if" story: what would have happened if Doggerland had still existed? Six pages (and look at page 5 and 6 of that thread, "Ran's home: Doggerland, a history" )

And more people seem to have the idea of a relation between the Frisians and Doggerland:

It seems as though we might conceive of Doggerland almost as a kind of local, small-scale Atlantis, whose gradual submergence forced its inhabitants to migrate to Britain on the west and the Netherlands on the east. As they did so, they could have maintained their sedentary ways by acquiring the new techniques of agriculture, which were just then arriving from the east and south.

Additional evidence is provided by the Frisian language and culture. These days, the Frisians amount to some 400,000 people living in one province of the Netherlands and speaking their own distinctive language. In the Dark Ages and Middle Ages, however, they extended much further up and down the North Sea coast.

Frisian has the distinction of being the closest of any language to English. A bit of traditional doggerel, concocted to demonstrate the point, runs, "'Good butter and good cheese' is good English and good Fries."

The unique closeness of this relationship has always provided something of a problem for the theory that English is descended from the languages of German and Danish invaders who came from much further east than Friesland.. However, if we accept that both English and Frisian have been spoken in their current locations for the last 10,000 years -- and that the proto-English which gave rise to both of them was also the language of lost Doggerland -- the paradoxes vanish.

The only unanswered questions that remain have to do with what the the potentially sophisticated Mesolithic culture of Doggerland might actually have been like -- and what traces it may have left in the societies on either side of the North Sea that it influenced.

Abramelin 2,545

As extra information that the Zeno brothers just fabricated a story about their experiences in the mythical "Frisland Island", I have here a map that's even older (published in 1539) by a Olaus Magnus (and copied by the Frenchman Antoine Lafrery) :

CARTA MARINA 1539 / 1572

Antonio Lafreri's copy of Carta Marina by Olaus Magnus is the most renowned copper engraving based on the original nine-leaf wood engraving. The map on the right is a facsimile copy from 1967. French cartographer Antonio Lafreri (1512-1577), whose name in French is written

Antoine Lafrery, engraved downsized versions of a number of maps, including Carta Marina in 1572. This map was published in Italy.

Olaus Magnus (1490-1557) was a catholic priest. He was sent to the northern parts of the kingdom on church business in 1519, exploring the Tornio River Valley to reach Pello. Receiving great inspiration from his trip, he published the diligently translated and long-standing influential classic Historia de gentibus septentrionalis (1555; History of Northern Peoples.)

Olaus Magnus published Carta Marina in 1539 as his preliminary historical work, the first map that came close to depicting the true geography of the Nordic countries. The inland areas of the nations were still rather arbitrarily drawn, yet the shorelines were drawn more realistically.

Today R1b1c9 is found mostly on the fringes of the North Sea in England, Germany and the Netherlands, where it reaches levels of one-third. That distribution suggests that some of the first men to bear the haplogroup in their Y-chromosomes were residents of Doggerland, a real-life Atlantis that was swallowed up by rising seas in the millennia following the Ice Age.

Doggerland was a low-lying region of forests and wetlands that must have been rich in game; today, fishing trawlers in the North Sea occasionally dredge up the bones and tusks of the mastadons that roamed there. Doggerland had its heyday between about 12,000 years ago, when the Ice Age climate began to ameliorate, and 9,000 years ago, when the meltwaters of the gradually retreating glaciers caused sea levels to rise, drowning the hunter’s paradise. Doggerland’s inhabitants retreated to the higher ground that is now the North Sea coast.

Recent genetic studies have challenged the traditional view that the ancestors of British Celtic people spread from central Europe during the Iron Age and have suggested a much earlier origin for them as part of the human recolonization of Britain at the end of the last glaciation. Here we propose that small mammals provide an analogue to help resolve this controversy. Previous studies have shown that common shrews (Sorex araneus) with particular chromosomal characteristics and water voles (Arvicola terrestris) of a specific mitochondrial (mt) DNA lineage have peripheral western/northern distributions with striking similarities to that of Celtic people. We show that mtDNA lineages of three other small mammal species (bank vole Myodes glareolus, field vole Microtus agrestis and pygmy shrew Sorex minutus) also form a ‘Celtic fringe’. We argue that these small mammals most reasonably colonized Britain in a two-phase process following the last glacial maximum (LGM), with climatically driven partial replacement of the first colonists by the second colonists, leaving a peripheral geographical distribution for the first colonists. We suggest that these natural Celtic fringes provide insight into the same phenomenon in humans and support its origin in processes following the end of the LGM.

So, the hight of the tsunami as it arrived on the northern sea edge of Doggerland is quite a bit less huge than I first posted (I said 20 meters, like 60 feet).

But there are a few thoughts I'd like to add.

First, the shape of Doggerland is based on bathymetric research. Meaning: the shape of Doggerland is based on depth soundings of the present North Sea floor (and similar data), but no one knows how much present and more ancient sea currents reshaped the North Sea floor after it got flooded. It is now assumed that Doggerland, around 6100 BC, was much larger than previously assumed (as in the pdf file).

Btw, it's really amazing that I am one of the very few posting in this thread.

If the believers in submerged continents and civilizations would be willing to break their brains on scientific data, they would know that this is the place to focus upon.

So, the hight of the tsunami as it arrived on the northern sea edge of Doggerland is quite a bit less huge than I first posted (I said 20 meters, like 60 feet).

But there are a few thoughts I'd like to add.

First, the shape of Doggerland is based on bathymetric research. Meaning: the shape of Doggerland is based on depth soundings of the present North Sea floor (and similar data), but no one knows how much present and more ancient sea currents reshaped the North Sea floor after it got flooded. It is now assumed that Doggerland, around 6100 BC, was much larger than previously assumed (as in the pdf file).

Btw, it's really amazing that I am one of the very few posting in this thread.

If the believers in submerged continents and civilizations would be willing to break their brains on scientific data, they would know that this is the place to focus upon.

OK, this is real, maybe that is the real problem for them, heh....

Personally I believe that the window for culture to develop in Doggerland would have been much smaller than the window that was available for other submerged lands. The area would have been under ice for much of the time, and when the ice subsided there would have been a brief window of opportunity for hunters to colonize the area before again it returned to the sea. Therefore I feel it would have been a small and "primitive" culture which took advantage of a great opportunity whilst it lasted. In Ireland the Ice retreated for a very brief period in the last Ice age, and I cannot see doggerland been more favoured considering its more Northern location and its more continental climate.

The difference with Sunaland and Tamil and the areas in the Indian ocean is that throughout the extended period of the Ice age they would have been free of ice, flat, fertile, with good stable coastal lands and a very very benign climate. It is not surprise that the Tamils have written records of this time, and it is talked of glowingly as the golden age. The Indus Valley Civilization and the emmerging Japanese cultures may well be relics of this period. There is widespread evidence that their culture had influence over a very wide area. It is the nearest thing to a "Mother culture" we are likely to encounter.

So my point is that though the Doggerland area is of interest for the fact that it existed, and influenced early European culture to some small degree, it has nothing to compare to the potential that the Asian sunken lands have. I think the potential for major sunken finds in South East Asia is so much greater that Doggerland would have to take a lower priority.

I would have to say that my analysis is based on a far bigger body of scientific research in multiple fields of endeavor, it seem that many experts are beginning to see this area as a key location in multiple ways. I am genuinely interested, so if you feel my personal analysis is flawed then I would love to be corrected.

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Br Cornelius 5,933

Br Cornelius 5,933

- The 'brief window of opportunity' would have been several thousands of years; that window of time was enough for Europeans to become a dominating culture.

- About your favorite topic, "Sundaland", only theories exist, and no solid proof of what was actually down there.

- You have no idea at all about the potential of Doggerland, nor have I.

- Btw, Oppenheimer also had his theories about Doggerland...

I think a few thousand years from a purely Metholithic culture is just not enough to make a big cultural contribution.

In the other sunken lands the period for development stretches into 10's of thousands of years - which offers plenty enough time for a culture to evolve. This is what I am basing my opinion on.

I have read quite a bit on genetic and skeletal comparisons in the whole Oceania area, and there is a growing body of evidence to show that genetically it was one of the corner stones of mans development. There is also evidence for isolated individual South East Asians turning up in some very unlikely location around the globe.

Truly I have no axe to grind on this one, and if I had the time to revisit my searches I would point you to the evidence I have come across (all scientific in origin). I just think the potential for doggerland is limited, and you are entitled to prove me wrong

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Br Cornelius 5,933

Br Cornelius 5,933

I have nothing to prove you wrong as long as they don't drag up some remnants of people, animals and plants from the bottom of the present Sunda Shelf.

I know the story about Sundaland - I have read Oppenheimer and that guy with the Spanish name I know forgot - and it's very interesting.

NOW I'd like to see what Sundaland might have looked like when it was still above water.

And some proof that catastrophic floods and not a slow submergence by the rising sea level destroyed it (for Oppenheimer tried to prove that Sundaland was the origin of the Atlantis myth).

He made a brief reference to the possibility that it may have been Atlantis. As his title suggests though he was much more interested in it been the Garden of Eden, and he never speculated that it was anything other than Neolithic. What he was interested in was the cohesion it imposed on legendary history.

What I do find fascinating about doggeland is the light that it casts on the extreme spread of man in very ancient times, and how adaptable they were to local conditions. To me this points to early man as been around to take advantage of almost all opportunities, and having the Sea faring ability to get to all these lost locations. For me it points to the fact that the ice age was a tremendous opportunity for man, which he seized, and only experienced a relatively minor setback at the end of the iceage when everything changed so dramatically.

Br Cornelius

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Abramelin 2,545

Abramelin 2,545

He made a brief reference to the possibility that it may have been Atlantis. As his title suggests though he was much more interested in it been the Garden of Eden, and he never speculated that it was anything other than Neolithic. What he was interested in was the cohesion it imposed on legendary history.

What I do find fascinating about doggeland is the light that it casts on the extreme spread of man in very ancient times, and how adaptable they were to local conditions. To me this points to early man as been around to take advantage of almost all opportunities, and having the Sea faring ability to get to all these lost locations. For me it points to the fact that the ice age was a tremendous opportunity for man, which he seized, and only experienced a relatively minor setback at the end of the iceage when everything changed so dramatically.

Br Cornelius

Yes, you are right about Oppenheimer; I think I confused him with that other guy, an Alfonso Sanchez something who tried to prove Sundaland was Atlantis.

What fascinates me about Doggerland is that it was maybe a place of origin for many people living in the countries surrounding what is now the North Sea, and that we hardly knew anything about it untill very recently.

I don't expect scientists to find megalithic structures there or anything grand and awesome, but it must have been a rather important country, and very probably the base of a seafaring peope. I would already be glad if they find (the remnants of) a nice big wooden ship there, dating from 8000 BP.

Well, Cornelius, why don't you post about Sundaland here, or in a separate thread? I think you are able to fill it with posts all of your own.

Abramelin 2,545

So, the hight of the tsunami as it arrived on the northern sea edge of Doggerland is quite a bit less huge than I first posted (I said 20 meters, like 60 feet).

But there are a few thoughts I'd like to add.

First, the shape of Doggerland is based on bathymetric research. Meaning: the shape of Doggerland is based on depth soundings of the present North Sea floor (and similar data), but no one knows how much present and more ancient sea currents reshaped the North Sea floor after it got flooded. It is now assumed that Doggerland, around 6100 BC, was much larger than previously assumed (as in the pdf file).

I created a mix of 2 maps, the one with the Storegga Slide (in red), and one with a more accurate depiction of the North Sea floor:

In the pdf I posted earlier it is said that the tsunami hit the southern North Sea with an approximate height of 3 meters.

But as you can see on the image I created, the tsunami - with an original height 0f 20 meters - hit the coast of Doggerland following a deeper area and subsequent channel.

Now:

"As a tsunami leaves the deep water of the open sea and propagates into the more shallow waters near the coast, it undergoes a transformation. Since the speed of the tsunami is related to the water depth, as the depth of the water decreases, the speed of the tsunami diminishes. The change of total energy of the tsunami remains constant. Therefore, the speed of the tsunami decreases as it enters shallower water, and the height of the wave grows. Because of this "shoaling" effect, a tsunami that was imperceptible in deep water may grow to be several feet or more in height."

"As a tsunami wave approaches the coast (where the sea becomes shallow), the trough (bottom) of a wave hits the beach floor, causing the wave to slow down, to increase in height (the amplitude is magnified many times) and to decrease in wavelength (the distance from crest to crest).

So, from the image I posted here one might conclude that the tsunami, right before it hit the north coast of Doggerland still retained a lot of it's original speed and devastating power, and the wave that actually flooded Doggerland (or the northern part of it) must have been quite a bit higher than 3 meters, and maybe even still 15 meters high. ("Steeper shorelines produce higher tsunami waves")

"When the Storegga landslide took place, it also resulted in the mass movement of moraine material that was deposited during several different ice ages in history. Six or seven different slide surfaces with low friction have been identified. The lowest sliding surface lies close to the bottom of the landslide area, which means that the landslide propagated backwards as it continuously jumped to the next sliding area. The landslide is about700 m deep. Which means that huge quantities of soil mass was in motion. It is very likely that this landslide process took place during some hours, or maximum during a couple of days."

That scientist who said that, although the submergence of Doggerland went fast, the people 'didn't have to run for the hills' was very right: they didn't have to run, they were swept over the hills, and maybe the same hills came right after them....

According to this Dutch site they found deposits caused by the Storegga Slide in Rotterdam: